Free The Shadow of Cincinnatus by Christopher Nuttall Page A

Marines to land and start taking over the planetary defenses, then followed Elf and her platoon as they marched the governor back to his shuttle. To all intents and purposes, they’d taken over the entire planet in a bloodless strike.
    But now we have to sort out just what the governor was doing , he mused. And see just how much of it was treasonous .
    * * *
    Camille had been lucky. The moment she’d seen the shuttles, she’d known the game was up. She’d ducked into the tunnels as the Marines landed, then put as much distance as she could between herself and the palace before popping up in the governor’s safe house. It wouldn’t remain secret forever, not when the tunnels were discovered, but it hardly mattered. By the time they found the house, she would be long gone.
    She changed her clothes, switching from the dress the governor had designed himself to a simple pair of trousers and a shirt, then hurried out onto the streets of Athena. None of the population seemed to have realized that there had been a shift in the balance of power, although they would – and soon. Far too many of them had worried over what would happen when the Grand Senate turned its attention back to Athena and discovered that the planet’s GPP was now staggeringly high. It wouldn’t be long before the governor was replaced by a horde of aristocratic locusts from Earth, each intent on draining as much as they could from the local economy. And then...
    There would be revolution, she knew. And the locals would have help.
    The apartment block was completely unremarkable in every way, identical to the dozens of others scattered around the city. She let herself in through the front door, made her way up to her apartment and closed the door firmly behind her. The tradecraft she’d pushed aside for years to avoid looking suspicious came to the fore and she checked around, making sure that the room was completely untouched. As soon as she was certain, she dug into a pile of datachips and removed one marked SELF-AWARENESS LESSONS, YEAR ONE. It was such a boring subject, she’d been told, that no one would look at it willingly. She took the chip, inserted it into her terminal, then entered the password. Moments later, she was looking at an advanced and thoroughly illegal compression and encryption program.
    She sucked in a breath, feeling her heart starting to race as she keyed in her message. Mere possession of an illicit encryption program would guarantee a lifetime in jail, if she wasn’t exiled to a colony world. The Grand Senate insisted that all such programs have back doors engineered into them, just to make sure that Federation Intelligence could decrypt the program, if necessary. And they’d discouraged anyone from trying to produce more advanced programs. But her program not only had no back door, it was actually more advanced and capable than any military-grade system available to the Federation. The mere presence of such a program would alarm the Federation, if they found out about it.
    Carefully, she finished typing her message and hit the encrypt key. Twenty seconds later, the message was firmly zipped up and almost completely undetectable, unless one knew to look for it and had the right equipment. She smiled as she deactivated the chip and returned it to the hiding place, buried under dozens of equally boring chips, then activated the camera on the terminal. A red light flashed on, indicating she was being recorded.
    “Oh, Jim, you hunk of burning love,” she said, as she removed her shirt and exposed her breasts. The lines were tacky, but no one would pay any attention to them while she was topless and playing with herself. “If you were here just now, do you know what I would do to you?”
    She smiled as she finished the recording, then added the compressed file to the video stream. No one would think anything of a girlfriend sending her boyfriend erotic messages; the security officers might enjoy themselves watching her